Scott Kirsner: “I would just note that most TV and movie execs think of user-gen as the Internet version of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and that’s a mistake — it’s much broader and more diverse… and that pigeon-holing seems like the kind of thing that’s destined to lead to some strategic blunders”.
MiniBar - the web meetup for Londonites
Friday night I was at the London MiniBar at Corbet Place, Old Truman Brewery. This was a chance to informally meet and chat with other people who are involved or interested in web related projects. With so much of the web related action seeming to be happening stateside it was really good to meet people who were London based.
The theme for this months meeting was “Online Video - What to do with all this user generated content?”. Michela Ledwidge did a presentation on Modfilms that aim to become a platform for storytellers to exchange film components and remix them into new works. I had a chat with her afterwards and the project is definitely one to keep an eye on.
John Wilson was live blogging the event, info about the other presentations in his post.
It was good hanging out with Toby Harris (*spark), Ali McClymont (superfineshag), Amit Kothari (QuotationsBook), Marton Dow (Rightscom), Deirdre Molloy (Chinwag) and Pete Tayor & Nana Aganovich (Aganovich).
The MiniBar is rapidly gathering momentum, I’ll certainly be there next month.
Arin Crumley’s latest videoblog “The Collective Experience” made at the Sundance Film festival looks at whether going to the cinema is dying out. Arin is a natural born storyteller.
I just bought my own private television station: marksmith.tv. I guess you guys aren’t ready for that, yet. But your kids are gonna love it.
The Future of TV
This past week I’ve been following a conversation that started with Mark Cuban and later added to by Dave Winer. The penny didn’t drop however until this evening when I read this article by Doc Searls.
Mark suggested that the recent push to get your computer hooked up to your TV so that you could display internet content on it was actually the wrong way around: let people use the internet to upload content to satellite and cable companies and these then send it to our screens using their networks.
His point was that sending data over the internet requires one stream per person, per video (unicast) whereas traditional TV methods only require one stream to deliver to everyone who is subscribed (unicast). Streaming over the internet is way expensive.
Dave suggests is that set top boxes will have HTTP servers in them aswell as the decoders used to make sense of the satellite or cable signal. TVs themselves will have HTTP clients inside them that will act as viewers. You’ll be able to subscribe to marksmith.tv no sweat.
With equipment comming out soon like the Red Camera which allows you to digitally shoot the same quality as 35 mm film and with a price tag of $17,000, it won’t be long before the price is driven down even further. Young film makers are getting really excited about this. Home cinema projectors are cheap and extremely good quality. I have an HD one in my flat and it is incredible.
As the barriers of production and distribution are erroding, the reality of fully digital film making pipelines is getting closer than some realise. The next few years will be all about indie film making.
Doc Searls: “The marketplace that emerges in that flat new world will be many times larger than the old pyramids it replaces”.
Arin Crumley and Susan Buice the indie film makers responsible for Four Eyed Monsters are videoblogging daily from the Sundance Festival. If you don’t know anything about them then watch a few of the videoblogs they used to promote their film here [start from the bottom].
The teaser video they made before they left is here.
You should be able to find the the videos as they post them here.
This year the Sundance Channel has been setup where you can find all sorts of interviews and festival dailies.
If you work in film keep an eye on what’s going on here because the indie film makers are really starting to embrace the web and use it, not only for distribution of media but as an entire platform for making films. As people in the film industry we need to be following these digital media evangelists, interacting, connecting and experimenting with them, finding out how they are making films in this new world so we can figure out how we can help them.
All I can think right now is why am I not at Sundance?
Ze Frank goes to Hollywood! I’ve always thought that Ze was the webs answer to Andy Koffman. It sure will be a sad day on March 17th when he posts his last show. Better to quit while you’re ahead and move on to bigger and better things, that’s what I say. I’m imagining a film kind of like War Games but instead of playing thermo-global nuclear war with Joshua, he plays bizare games with people all over the world using only a powerbook and a dv cam.
Steve Rosenbaum: “Power is shifting from content pipe to contextual”.
Jeff Jarvis reports on how the Davos conference this year is experimenting with the web by opening up the conversation into and out of Davos. Get to the Davos conversations here.
Reuters: “U.S. news organizations are increasingly calling on their reporters and editors to write news blogs and compete with the expanding Internet format for informal analysis and opinion”.
Apollo is a cross-OS runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills in Flash, Flex, HTML and Ajax. You can sign up for the Beta now. Ted Patrick presented Apollo at Mashup Camp.
Cinematical: “Crumley and Buice have been asked to travel to Sundance to shoot daily videos which will be broadcast through YouTube as part of a collaboration (their first) with the Sundance Channel”.
The collaboration comes right after their very successful experiment in Second Life. Anything that the guys from Four Eyed Monsters touch I’m sure will be huge. I’ll definitely be watching. Independent film making is breaking out onto the web quick. If main stream film companies want to know what the world is going to be like in a few years, this is the direction they should look.
Mark Pilgrim has written a history of DVD copy protection which is very interesting, especially in the light of all the talk about the Netflix anouncement which I’ve been waiting for since Scoble wrote about it.
Netflix, the world’s largest online movie rental service, will give customers the choice of either having the DVDs sent out to them or watching the content straight on their PCs.
Screencast Demo of the new service.
Robert Sobble’s not too happy about the streaming: “Hollywood: you need to find a better solution”.
Dave Winer: “It’s another example of the movie industry’s lack of will to compete”.
Mike Arrington: “Studios contributing to Netflix’s new service include NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers, Lionsgate and New Line Cinema.”
Thinking different…
This video for the Apple “Think different” campain is great. Ignore for a second that it is an Apple branding exercise and just look at the message. This is the sort of thing that is happening on the web every single day.
I’ve been reading Jello Biafra’s Wikipedia page.
He is an american punk rock musician and politcal activist best known for being the lead singer and song writer of the Dead Kennedys (78-86). Inertia, my high school’s best band when I was there used to do loads of covers of theirs.
A bit of Googling revealed that his record label Alternative Tentacles have a podcast covering the music they release and also some polical speaking by Jello.
I also found a very old interview with him by an impressively young Jools Holland.
Wordpress not good for my feed?
I’ve noticed recently that because of the way I write the blog if you read this via the feed you might miss updates that I make throughout the day. I tend to make one “dcinput daily” post and add to it. Unfortunately if you read the post early in the day and mark it as read in your aggregator then following updates won’t show up. I am looking for a way of using Wordpress to get around this currently so sorry about that. Suggestions welcome.
Windows adverts sure aren’t what they used to be. Bring back the 386!
Andrew Orlowski’s take on the Net Neutrality saga is very interesting.
Scott Kirsner: “In a world where channels are increasingly irrelevant, content producers need to pay attention to ways to build a loyal following, by building mailing lists, maintaining RSS feeds and blogs, or getting viewers to “subscribe” in some other way to a continuing string of videos”.
Hugh MacLeod’s is collecting and publishing manifestos. Great idea. I like the latest one - the social customer manifesto. Good ideas need to be spread around. He is also organising a day out at the Tate in the hope that it might drag people away from their screens and inject a bit of culture into our web heads, init.
David Sacks seems like a pretty interesting entrepreneur. His new project called Geni will attempt to create a family tree of the whole world.
Sundance’s online efforts are ramping up. I attended a screening in Second Life only a few days ago which was certainly interesting and they are to start selling short films on iTunes“. It’s really exciting to see film makers starting to embrace the web and start to experiement. In the comming years independant film making is going to explode.
Wired: “The festival seems eager to come to you. A push to make the influential event accessible to the masses is under way, with a series of initiatives designed to spread the gospel of Sundance-branded independent film around the world”.
Steve Rubel: “The rapid pace of change will not only turn TV into an open content platform, but it will radically shift how advertising dollars are allocated and how the entire ad industry operates.”
Susan Buice: “I just want to make something that resonates because when I see something that resonates with me I feel connected. Feeling connected to the world and to other human experiences is what makes me feel alive and happy. When I don’t feel connected I feel like a meaningless blob of flesh and I want to die.”
I picked this quote from Susan Buice because it made my laugh. It’s part of an interview she did with Arin Crumbley with whom she runs Four Eyed Monsters. Go read the interview and pay attention to these guys because they are doing interesting things. Arin is responsible for the Open Source Documentary about Net Neutrality that I wrote about a while back. That piece of work and a few other things that were happening to me at the time all converged together helping me to form new ideas about film making, documentary making and more generally how the web is turning things on their head. Ultimately it lead to my mini-essay on the disintermediation of film making. Now while I think and talk about these things Arin and Susan are out there actually doing cool stuff. I think you should pay them some attention and others do to.
Andrew Baron: “I am very optimistic for TiVo’s future as far as his vision for seamlessly merging i.p. and broadcast content”.
If you’re wondering what all this videoblogging stuff is all about then check out this little report by Chuck Cirino of Weird America at the Vloggies. Even though this happened a while back I only just saw this footage now. Sure looked like fun.
Washington Post: “No single programming department can outstrip the creativity of the entire Internet. When carriers limit the choice of programming to whatever sites or services can strike the best deal with carriers — wriggling past the usual palace guard of marketing reps and lawyers — they weaken the entire appeal of phone video”.
Mike Arrington: “Let’s just declare TV Dead and Move On”.
Intelligent users are generating content
Today I’m linking to Dave Winer’s 10 minute podcast entitled How to Make Money on the Internet. He’s written about this subject several times before and each time I’ve found his ideas helpful in understanding the changes we’re seeing in society as well as in business as the web grows in importance in our world.
I felt it was particulary relevant to my recent posts exploring the disintermediation of film making [2nd heading down]. If disintermediation in this space is to happen at all, instead of being brought about by people making films funded by eyeballs and advertising, maybe it will be caused by people making films to sell products.
Dave’s vision is that entrepreuners will be able to make products that users actually want and they’ll do this by paying close attention to all this user generated content. Until recently the users have been treated like an audience. Funnily enough, it’s actually the users, formely treated as the audience, that hold the intelligence.
Is this still film making? And who are the middlemen that get disintermediated here? Who’s making films, the users or the entrepreneurs? Hold on but the users are the entrepreuners, so it kind of seems like everyone’s making films. In fact it’s looking like everyone’s going to have to use their personal media platforms (blogging/podcasts/videoblogging) just in order to get anything done properly. Hmm.
D-Cinema Bond
Last night I went to the Odeon in Leicester Square to go and see the new James Bond film Casino Royal. I chose that cinema because I new that they had a d-cinema screen there. Now I’ve seen what the d-cinema screen at work looks like but never actually been to a big theatre with one. I knew that the trailers and adverts most probably weren’t going to be digital but as soon as the feature started it was obvious to me that film is dead. If you don’t believe me then watch the opening credits to Bond on a massive d-cinema screen. The colours are so incredibly vibrant and everything moving on the screen so incredibly crisp that you find yourself looking with your eyes wide open in amazement.
Google Video: “This short by Neill Blomkamp depicts a fictional world where extraterrestrials have become refugees in South Africa. Producers: Neill Blomkamp, Simon Hansen, Sharlto Copley, Shannon Worley”. Amazing what a few people can do these days. I’d love to know how long it took them, what tools they used, what workflows they were using, how they colaborated etc. Great short.
Another great short by Vancouver Film School graduate Ori Ben-Shabat. Lots of neeto vfx in this one.
More on the disintermediation of film making
Wired News: “You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theater, right? […] You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That’s the lesson of Lonelygirl15″.
A few days ago Penelope Trunk’s post Thinking about videoblogging? You should probably forget about it caused all sorts of discussion on the videoblogging mailing list. Anne from Loaded Pun explains why people on the videoblogging mailing list were annoyed and also ends with what I think the crucial question is: What are you hoping to get out of your vlog?
After reading my post on the disintermediation of film making, Penelope asked me via email whether I thought that the lonelygirl15 affair (check this article) on YouTube was what I was talking about and yes that is absolutely an example of disintermediation of film making. There is a guy, he has this idea for a web based show, he shoots it and puts it out there. Classic disintermediation. What was Mesh Flinders hoping to get out of his vlog? There’s no doubt about it, he was wanted to make money.
So to make money you have to have a product. What’s his product? He’s giving away the show for free to his audience, so it’s not that. He sells advertising space. That’s his product. It kind of feels like it’s the show, but actually it’s the advertising space. The more people watch his shows the more his product is worth. Seems simple doesn’t it: that’s how you make money in videoblogging.
The truth however is slightly different. In fact to see the truth you have to think a little differently. You see lonelygirl15, Rocketboom and ZeFrank are special cases. The thing they are selling, their product, happens to be the videoblog itself (well the advertising really). The vast majority of people in the world sell things we more easily associate with the word ‘product’ like software, food, televisions, holidays.
Blogging, podcasting and videoblogging are all personal media platforms. They are personal information processors that you can use in any endeavor you choose, from making a web based show to raising money for charity to making people aware of a particular issue, to building a business and more generally for selling products of any kind. Use them for communicating, for publicity, for feedback, for gererating new ideas. You’re in control.
You think Adam Curry just has a hit podcast called Daily Source Code? Wrong. The Daily Source Code is his media platform for building his business called Podshow. He also sells advertising so it’s a little confusing. Wait until people start using these mediums to sell products, build companies or to run political campains. That’s when things will really get exciting. That’s what I saw at Podcastcon UK last weekend: normal people who run normal businesses using the mediums in new and interesting ways.
Film making won’t disintermediate with people in the film/entertainment industry alone. There aren’t enough people and there isn’t enough money to be made. It will disintermediate when every person in every industry can use it to build their business. Sure you’ll need some talent, but you need talent to be a good at anything in life.
In the mailing group the title that linked to Penelope’s post was “Disturbing opinions”. I would disagree entirely. I think her piece was a fantastic conversation starter. It got everyone thinking. No doubt some people will think I’m talking a lot of crap, but then we’re all learning as we go along.